OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Query-specific Variable Depth Pooling via Query Performance Prediction towards Reducing Relevance Assessment Effort
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2023
Year: 2023

Due to the massive size of test collections, a standard practice in IR evaluation is to construct a 'pool' of candidate relevant documents comprised of the top-k documents retrieved by a wide range of different retrieval systems - a process called depth-k pooling. A standard practice is to set the depth (k) to a constant value for each query constituting the benchmark set. However, in this paper we argue that the annotation effort can be substantially reduced if the depth of the pool is made a variable quantity for each query, the rationale being that the number of documents relevant to the information need can widely vary across queries. Our hypothesis is that a lower depth for the former class of queries and a higher depth for the latter can potentially reduce the annotation effort without a significant change in retrieval effectiveness evaluation. We make use of standard query performance prediction (QPP) techniques to estimate the number of potentially relevant documents for each query, which is then used to determine the depth of the pool. Our experiments conducted on standard test collections demonstrate that this proposed method of employing query-specific variable depths is able to adequately reflect the relative effectiveness of IR systems with a substantially smaller annotation effort.
The Case for Hierarchical Deep Learning Inference at the Network Edge
Venue: arXiv cs.DC 2023
Year: 2023

Resource-constrained Edge Devices (EDs), e.g., IoT sensors and microcontroller units, are expected to make intelligent decisions using Deep Learning (DL) inference at the edge of the network. Toward this end, there is a significant research effort in developing tinyML models - Deep Learning (DL) models with reduced computation and memory storage requirements - that can be embedded on these devices. However, tinyML models have lower inference accuracy. On a different front, DNN partitioning and inference offloading techniques were studied for distributed DL inference between EDs and Edge Servers (ESs). In this paper, we explore Hierarchical Inference (HI), a novel approach proposed by Vishnu et al. 2023, arXiv:2304.00891v1 , for performing distributed DL inference at the edge. Under HI, for each data sample, an ED first uses a local algorithm (e.g., a tinyML model) for inference. Depending on the application, if the inference provided by the local algorithm is incorrect or further assistance is required from large DL models on edge or cloud, only then the ED offloads the data sample. At the outset, HI seems infeasible as the ED, in general, cannot know if the local inference is sufficient or not. Nevertheless, we present the feasibility of implementing HI for machine fault detection and image classification applications. We demonstrate its benefits using quantitative analysis and argue that using HI will result in low latency, bandwidth savings, and energy savings in edge AI systems.
NoiseTrans: Point Cloud Denoising with Transformers
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Point clouds obtained from capture devices or 3D reconstruction techniques are often noisy and interfere with downstream tasks. The paper aims to recover the underlying surface of noisy point clouds. We design a novel model, NoiseTrans, which uses transformer encoder architecture for point cloud denoising. Specifically, we obtain structural similarity of point-based point clouds with the assistance of the transformer's core self-attention mechanism. By expressing the noisy point cloud as a set of unordered vectors, we convert point clouds into point embeddings and employ Transformer to generate clean point clouds. To make the Transformer preserve details when sensing the point cloud, we design the Local Point Attention to prevent the point cloud from being over-smooth. In addition, we also propose sparse encoding, which enables the Transformer to better perceive the structural relationships of the point cloud and improve the denoising performance. Experiments show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in various datasets and noise environments.
Local Energy Distribution Based Hyperparameter Determination for Stochastic Simulated Annealing
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2023
Year: 2023

This paper presents a local energy distribution based hyperparameter determination for stochastic simulated annealing (SSA). SSA is capable of solving combinatorial optimization problems faster than typical simulated annealing (SA), but requires a time-consuming hyperparameter search. The proposed method determines hyperparameters based on the local energy distributions of spins (probabilistic bits). The spin is a basic computing element of SSA and is graphically connected to other spins with its weights. The distribution of the local energy can be estimated based on the central limit theorem (CLT). The CLT-based normal distribution is used to determine the hyperparameters, which reduces the time complexity for hyperparameter search from O(n^3) of the conventional method to O(1). The performance of SSA with the determined hyperparameters is evaluated on the Gset and K2000 benchmarks for maximum-cut problems. The results show that the proposed method achieves mean cut values of approximately 98% of the best-known cut values.
On the Parameterized Complexity of Controlling Approval-Based Multiwinner Voting: Destructive Model \& Sequential Rules
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

Over the past few years, the (parameterized) complexity landscape of constructive control for many prevalent approval-based multiwinner voting (ABMV) rules has been explored. We expand these results in two directions. First, we study constructive control for sequential Thiele's rules. Second, we study destructive counterparts of these problems. Our exploration leads to a comprehensive understanding of the complexity of these problems. Along the way, we also study several interesting axiomatic properties of ABMV rules, and obtain generic results for rules fulfilling these properties. In particular, we show that for many rules satisfying these properties, election control problems are generally hard to solve from a parameterized complexity point of view, even when restricted to certain special cases.
Survey on Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation for Visual Perception in Automated Driving
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Deep neural networks (DNNs) have proven their capabilities in many areas in the past years, such as robotics, or automated driving, enabling technological breakthroughs. DNNs play a significant role in environment perception for the challenging application of automated driving and are employed for tasks such as detection, semantic segmentation, and sensor fusion. Despite this progress and tremendous research efforts, several issues still need to be addressed that limit the applicability of DNNs in automated driving. The bad generalization of DNNs to new, unseen domains is a major problem on the way to a safe, large-scale application, because manual annotation of new domains is costly, particularly for semantic segmentation. For this reason, methods are required to adapt DNNs to new domains without labeling effort. The task, which these methods aim to solve is termed unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA). While several different domain shifts can challenge DNNs, the shift between synthetic and real data is of particular importance for automated driving, as it allows the use of simulation environments for DNN training. In this work, we present an overview of the current state of the art in this field of research. We categorize and explain the different approaches for UDA. The number of considered publications is larger than any other survey on this topic. The scope of this survey goes far beyond the description of the UDA state-of-the-art. Based on our large data and knowledge base, we present a quantitative comparison of the approaches and use the observations to point out the latest trends in this field. In the following, we conduct a critical analysis of the state-of-the-art and highlight promising future research directions. With this survey, we aim to facilitate UDA research further and encourage scientists to exploit novel research directions to generalize DNNs better.
On arch factorization and subword universality for words and compressed words
Venue: arXiv cs.FL 2023
Year: 2023

Using arch-jumping functions and properties of the arch factorization of words, we propose a new algorithm for computing the subword circular universality index of words. We also introduce the subword universality signature for words, that leads to simple algorithms for the universality indexes of SLP-compressed words.
MMC: Multi-Modal Colorization of Images using Textual Descriptions
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Handling various objects with different colors is a significant challenge for image colorization techniques. Thus, for complex real-world scenes, the existing image colorization algorithms often fail to maintain color consistency. In this work, we attempt to integrate textual descriptions as an auxiliary condition, along with the grayscale image that is to be colorized, to improve the fidelity of the colorization process. To do so, we have proposed a deep network that takes two inputs (grayscale image and the respective encoded text description) and tries to predict the relevant color components. Also, we have predicted each object in the image and have colorized them with their individual description to incorporate their specific attributes in the colorization process. After that, a fusion model fuses all the image objects (segments) to generate the final colorized image. As the respective textual descriptions contain color information of the objects present in the image, text encoding helps to improve the overall quality of predicted colors. In terms of performance, the proposed method outperforms existing colorization techniques in terms of LPIPS, PSNR and SSIM metrics.
Context Sensitivity without Contexts: A Cut-Shortcut Approach to Fast and Precise Pointer Analysis
Venue: arXiv cs.PL 2023
Year: 2023

Over the past decades, context sensitivity has been considered as one of the most effective ideas for improving the precision of pointer analysis for Java. However, despite great precision benefits, as each method is equivalently cloned and analyzed under each context, context sensitivity brings heavy efficiency costs. In this work, we present a fundamentally different approach called Cut-Shortcut for fast and precise pointer analysis for Java. Its insight is simple: the main effect of cloning methods under different contexts is to filter spurious object flows that have been merged inside a callee method; from the view of a typical pointer flow graph (PFG), such effect can be simulated by cutting off (Cut) the edges that introduce precision loss to certain pointers and adding Shortcut edges directly from source pointers to the target ones circumventing the method on PFG. As a result, we can achieve the effect of context sensitivity without contexts. We identify three general program patterns and develop algorithms based on them to safely cut off and add shortcut edges on PFG, formalize them and formally prove the soundness. To comprehensively validate Cut-Shortcut's effectiveness, we implement two versions of Cut-Shortcut for two state-of-the-art pointer analysis frameworks for Java, one in Datalog for the declarative Doop and the other in Java for the imperative Tai-e, and we consider all the large and complex programs used in recent literatures that meet the experimental requirements. The evaluation results are extremely promising: Cut-Shortcut is even able to run faster than context insensitivity for most evaluated programs while obtaining high precision that is comparable to context sensitivity (if scalable) in both frameworks. This is for the first time that we have been able to achieve such a good efficiency and precision trade-off for those hard-to-analyze programs.
Exploration and Exploitation of Hidden PMU Events
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Performance Monitoring Unit (PMU) is a common hardware module in Intel CPUs. It can be used to record various CPU behaviors therefore it is often used for performance analysis and optimization. Of the 65536 event spaces, Intel has officially published only 200 or so. In this paper, we design a hidden PMU event collection method. And we found a large number of undocumented PMU events in CPUs of Skylake, Kabylake, and Alderlake microarchitectures. We further demonstrate the existence of these events by using them for transient execution attack detection and build-side channel attacks. This also implies that these hidden PMU events have huge exploitation potential and security threats.
Intuitionistic S4 is decidable
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2023
Year: 2023

In this paper we demonstrate decidability for the intuitionistic modal logic S4 first formulated by Fischer Servi. This solves a problem that has been open for almost thirty years since it had been posed in Simpson's PhD thesis in 1994. We obtain this result by performing proof search in a labelled deductive system that, instead of using only one binary relation on the labels, employs two: one corresponding to the accessibility relation of modal logic and the other corresponding to the order relation of intuitionistic Kripke frames. Our search algorithm outputs either a proof or a finite counter-model, thus, additionally establishing the finite model property for intuitionistic S4, which has been another long-standing open problem in the area.
Investigating the Perceived Impact of Maternity on Software Engineering: a Women's Perspective
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2023
Year: 2023

Background: Several researchers report the impact of gender on software development teams, especially in relation to women. In general, women are under-represented on these teams and face challenges and difficulties in their workplaces. When it comes to women who are mothers, these challenges can be amplified and directly impact these women's professional lives, both in industry and academia. However, little is known about women ICT practitioners' perceptions of the challenges of maternity in their professional careers. Objective: This paper investigates mothers' challenges and difficulties in global software development teams. Method: We conducted a survey with women ICT practitioners who work in academia and global technology companies. We surveyed 141 mothers from different countries and employed mixed methods to analyze the data. Results: Our findings reveal that women face sociocultural challenges, including work-life balance issues, bad jokes, and moral harassment. Furthermore, few women occupy leadership positions in software teams, and most reported that they did not have a support network during and after maternity leave, feeling overloaded. The surveyed women suggested a set of actions to reduce the challenges they face in their workplaces, such as: i) changing culture; ii) creating a code of conduct for men; iii) more empathy; iv) creating childcare within companies; and v) creating opportunities/programs for women in the software industry and academia. Conclusion: Adding to the underrepresentation of ICT roles, women also face many challenges in one important phase of women's lives, maternity. Our findings explore these challenges and can help organizations in developing policies to minimize them. Furthermore, it can help raise awareness of co-workers and bosses, toward a more friendly and inclusive workplace.
Explainable AI Insights for Symbolic Computation: A case study on selecting the variable ordering for cylindrical algebraic decomposition
Venue: arXiv cs.SC 2023
Year: 2023

In recent years there has been increased use of machine learning (ML) techniques within mathematics, including symbolic computation where it may be applied safely to optimise or select algorithms. This paper explores whether using explainable AI (XAI) techniques on such ML models can offer new insight for symbolic computation, inspiring new implementations within computer algebra systems that do not directly call upon AI tools. We present a case study on the use of ML to select the variable ordering for cylindrical algebraic decomposition. It has already been demonstrated that ML can make the choice well, but here we show how the SHAP tool for explainability can be used to inform new heuristics of a size and complexity similar to those human-designed heuristics currently commonly used in symbolic computation.
DPAF: Image Synthesis via Differentially Private Aggregation in Forward Phase
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Differentially private synthetic data is a promising alternative for sensitive data release. Many differentially private generative models have been proposed in the literature. Unfortunately, they all suffer from the low utility of the synthetic data, particularly for images of high resolutions. Here, we propose DPAF, an effective differentially private generative model for high-dimensional image synthesis. Different from the prior private stochastic gradient descent-based methods that add Gaussian noises in the backward phase during the model training, DPAF adds a differentially private feature aggregation in the forward phase, bringing advantages, including the reduction of information loss in gradient clipping and low sensitivity for the aggregation. Moreover, as an improper batch size has an adverse impact on the utility of synthetic data, DPAF also tackles the problem of setting a proper batch size by proposing a novel training strategy that asymmetrically trains different parts of the discriminator. We extensively evaluate different methods on multiple image datasets (up to images of 128x128 resolution) to demonstrate the performance of DPAF.
Neurogenesis Dynamics-inspired Spiking Neural Network Training Acceleration
Venue: arXiv cs.NE 2023
Year: 2023

Biologically inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have attracted significant attention for their ability to provide extremely energy-efficient machine intelligence through event-driven operation and sparse activities. As artificial intelligence (AI) becomes ever more democratized, there is an increasing need to execute SNN models on edge devices. Existing works adopt weight pruning to reduce SNN model size and accelerate inference. However, these methods mainly focus on how to obtain a sparse model for efficient inference, rather than training efficiency. To overcome these drawbacks, in this paper, we propose a Neurogenesis Dynamics-inspired Spiking Neural Network training acceleration framework, NDSNN. Our framework is computational efficient and trains a model from scratch with dynamic sparsity without sacrificing model fidelity. Specifically, we design a new drop-and-grow strategy with decreasing number of non-zero weights, to maintain extreme high sparsity and high accuracy. We evaluate NDSNN using VGG-16 and ResNet-19 on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100 and TinyImageNet. Experimental results show that NDSNN achieves up to 20.52\% improvement in accuracy on Tiny-ImageNet using ResNet-19 (with a sparsity of 99\%) as compared to other SOTA methods (e.g., Lottery Ticket Hypothesis (LTH), SET-SNN, RigL-SNN). In addition, the training cost of NDSNN is only 40.89\% of the LTH training cost on ResNet-19 and 31.35\% of the LTH training cost on VGG-16 on CIFAR-10.
A note on the hull and linear complementary pair of cyclic codes
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2023
Year: 2023

The Euclidean hull of a linear code $C$ is defined as $C\cap C^{\perp}$, where $C^\perp$ denotes the dual of $C$ under the Euclidean inner product. A linear code with zero hull dimension is called a linear complementary dual (LCD) code. A pair $(C, D)$ of linear codes of length $n$ over $\mathbb{F}_q$ is called a linear complementary pair (LCP) of codes if $C\oplus D=\mathbb{F}_q^n$. In this paper, we give a characterization of LCD and LCP of cyclic codes of length $q^m-1$, $m \geq 1$, over the finite field $\mathbb{F}_q$ in terms of their basic dual zeros and their trace representations. We also formulate the hull dimension of a cyclic code of arbitrary length over $\mathbb{F}_q$ with respect to its basic dual zero. Moreover, we provide a general formula for the dimension of the intersection of two cyclic codes of arbitrary length over $\mathbb{F}_q$ based on their basic dual zeros.
Multi-cropping Contrastive Learning and Domain Consistency for Unsupervised Image-to-Image Translation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, unsupervised image-to-image translation methods based on contrastive learning have achieved state-of-the-art results in many tasks. However, in the previous works, the negatives are sampled from the input image itself, which inspires us to design a data augmentation method to improve the quality of the selected negatives. Moreover, the previous methods only preserve the content consistency via patch-wise contrastive learning in the embedding space, which ignores the domain consistency between the generated images and the real images of the target domain. In this paper, we propose a novel unsupervised image-to-image translation framework based on multi-cropping contrastive learning and domain consistency, called MCDUT. Specifically, we obtain the multi-cropping views via the center-cropping and the random-cropping with the aim of further generating the high-quality negative examples. To constrain the embeddings in the deep feature space, we formulate a new domain consistency loss, which encourages the generated images to be close to the real images in the embedding space of the same domain. Furthermore, we present a dual coordinate attention network by embedding positional information into the channel, which called DCA. We employ the DCA network in the design of generator, which makes the generator capture the horizontal and vertical global information of dependency. In many image-to-image translation tasks, our method achieves state-of-the-art results, and the advantages of our method have been proven through extensive comparison experiments and ablation research.
Dynamic generation and attribution of revenues in a video platform
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2023
Year: 2023

The consumption of online videos on the Internet grows every year, making it a market that increasingly generates a greater volume of income. This paper deals with a problem of great interest in this context: the allocation of the generated revenues in a video website between the website and the video creators. For this, we consider a dynamic model of the revenues generation. We will consider that revenue can come from two sources: through the pay-per-view system and through the insertion of advertisements in the videos. Then to study how to divide the revenues in a reasonable and fair way between the two parties, we consider a dynamic cooperative game that reflects the importance of each part in generating revenue. From this game, we determine how its Shapley value is and introduce other allocation rules derived from it. We provide a structure of algorithm to calculate the Shapley value and its derived rules. We show that the computational complexity of the algorithms is polynomial. Finally, we provide some illustrative examples and simulations to illustrate how the proposed allocation rules perform.
BadGPT: Exploring Security Vulnerabilities of ChatGPT via Backdoor Attacks to InstructGPT
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2023
Year: 2023

Recently, ChatGPT has gained significant attention in research due to its ability to interact with humans effectively. The core idea behind this model is reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning, a new paradigm that allows language models to align with human preferences, i.e., InstructGPT. In this study, we propose BadGPT, the first backdoor attack against RL fine-tuning in language models. By injecting a backdoor into the reward model, the language model can be compromised during the fine-tuning stage. Our initial experiments on movie reviews, i.e., IMDB, demonstrate that an attacker can manipulate the generated text through BadGPT.